psychological survey about Second Life

hi

I'd like to ask you for taking part in a survey about Second Life.

A couple of months ago I was publishing a similar survey about some other game (online activity) and it showed quite interesting results. I decided to rebuild it to check some additional hypotheses.

The new survey consists of 66 questions related to different aspects of Internet as well as some personality questions. Completing the whole survey should take between 10 and 15 minutes. I also added a simple role-playing (decision making) simulation at the end of the survey which is not necessary to complete (takes 1-2 minutes).

Of course all data you would enter will be kept private and used only for general analysis of motivation to use Internet or play online games.

The survey is a part of my Ph.D. project.


So if you want to help me I would be very grateful.

link: http://imind.info/survey/sl.php

Thank you.

Kate

ps. It is NOT a keylogger of any kind, don't worry.

Give yourself a leg up- read these fora long enough and you will encounter every twist in SL mentality - Search for survey or psychological or what have you too- you my find your information is already in here somewhere. We get about a dozen of these requests a month.

Amusing too, to ponder- how many of the higher learning institutions are resorting to
SL to teach for them?

Well we certainly have a good selection of Guinea pigs & Hamsters here to choose from

What the heck. I it's early in the morning and I'm killing time before I have to leave the house. I'm in.

Here's a real shortcut - we're all masochists. Else we wouldn't donate so much of our friggin' time to this hellishly unstable environment.

I'm truly not trying to be snarky, and having used an online method of research when I was in graduate school, I like to participate in similar research studies (although it does seem like we have been deluged with them lately)...

...anyway - for a person who is a doctoral candidate, I would think you could phrase questions like these another way:

"My real life is real fun."

"I know that what I do in my real life has a sense." (I sense? of what please?) I "think" you mean "purpose."

I have come across several other similarly phrased questions.

On the other hand, if English is not your first language, then I apologize.

I don't volunteer for tests anymore after that flubber unpleasantness.

What flubber unpleasantness did you encounter, Raymond?

For 48 hours, the drug they injected me with turned me into a green protuberance.

Isn't this in the wrong thread?

Yup....that's what I was thinking....I took it anyway...but I was like, gees...I could have come up with way better questions than this, yikes. A good grasp of the language is key lol when doing a survey.

I want L300 per survey from now on or I'm keeping my personal business, revelations about my inner psyche, deepest thoughts and sexual deviations to myself. So THERE.

At the rate these survey requests are coming in, I can afford to retire on mainland waterfront in no time.

I was going to suggest earlier- there are several sites that will pay you to take surveys...

I find it's fun giving false answers or making up answers. After all, they ask in a RP setting so RP answers they get

LOL, Toy. I wish I had thought of that.

For what it's worth, here is the results of the "Previous survey" the OP mentioned.
==== copy and pasted like a common criminal ====



Motivation for playing World of Warcraft
survey results


What is the motivation of millions of people who decide to pay a monthly fee to spend their time in a virtual world? The simplest answer might be: because they have fun. The described below results of the survey show that the motivation isn't that simple and that 'fun' may mean different things.


materials:

The survey consisted of 42 questions related to World of Warcraft and 60 NEO-FFI personality inventory questions.

The tested dimensions in the research were:

5 NEO-FFI personality dimensions: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness
Flow (optimal experience, a positive state of satisfacion and absorption in an activity. It is composed of 6 factors: Fun, Absorption, Curiosity, Challenge, Control, Goal) grouped in 3 categories (Flow at the start of playing, Flow at the best time, Flow now)
Addiction: no of the well known Internet addicion scales were used in the survey. Instead - 3 survey statements ('I think I play WoW too much', 'I would give up my current or future job if it was legal to earn real money by playing WoW', 'It happens quite often that I don't sleep or eat because I want to play WoW some more').and one question about average playing time per day related well do addiction
Life Satisfaction measured by Satisfaction with Life Scale
Value Crisis - 3 statements from Questionnaire to Measure Value Crisis by P. Oles


results:

787 valid responses to the survey were gathered. The statistical analysis showed a positive correlation between Neuroticism and Addicion. Both Neuroticism and Addiction correlated negatively with Life Satisfaction and Value Crisis. Addiction correlated positively with Flow now and Flow at the best time. There was no correlation between Neuroticism and Flow.

The above correlations show that neurotic players are less satisfied with their life and they may suffer from value crisis. They are also more addicted to the game. Addicted players experience more Flow in game but there was no significant difference in Flow between less and more neurotic players.

The above results show that neurotic players tend to get more addicted but they don't experience more Flow than less neurotic players. Yet Addiction correlates with flow. It is not Flow that makes neurotic players more addicted than less neurotic players. What is it then?

Some light may be shed to this problem if we analyze the components of Flow one by one. It appears that neurotic players have less fun in game (Fun now) than less neurotic players and they don't feel so much as less neurotic players that they can reach what they want (Control now and at the best time). On the other hand they are more absorbed in the game (Absorption now and at the best time).

So neurotic players get more addicted and absorbed in the game even though they have less fun. The correlation between Addiction and Absorption (Absorption now) is so strong (0.42 that the latter may in fact be one of the factors of Addiction. One could put the hypothesis that neurotic players have less fun than less neurotic players in general. The survey results don't support this hypothesis though. There are no significant differences in fun at the start of playing between less and more neurotic players.

To complicate the problem - Addiction unlike Neuroticism is positively correlated with fun.

The conducted survey can't explain this problem. Yet some hypotheses can be put for the future analysis purpose. Perhaps playing World of Warcraft by less and more neurotic players involves slightly different motivations? Perhaps less neurotic players get less addicted and absorbed in the game because their real lifes are more successful? On the other hand neurotic players would treat the game as a kind of escape from less satisfying real life? The positively meant flow state can't explain well why people get addicted in games. Perhaps there is an alternative escape flow state that includes escape factors like forgetting about problems or feeling less bored. Both flow state and escape flow state would motivate people to play games but on a different way.

oooo, you can take it multiple times to.

That was depressing.. like you're trying to make us feel depressed or lonely for playing internet games.. sheesh.. that was a waste of 4 minutes. hope you get an A- on your project now

and I want my 300L now please

Fell asleep reading that...

Well that was all rather silly to me.

Could've just aked 'Is SL taking over your life?' Yes.

'Do you mind?' Not at all.

as to the institution who is supporting your ph D project and the standard statement that applies to use of human subjects, as well as contact information for participants to receive study results if they are interested? This is standard protocol for ph-D research projects.

Thanks.

Margareta

It took 102 questions to say THAT??

My main problem with this survey, I think, is that it doesn't allow the survee (Thats the one taking it) to define which they consider their life, the computer or what's referred to as 'Real Life'.

Apologies, but for people like me, I choose computer. I love computers, and love what I do, and can do on them. I don't hang out with people in my RL, I don't go out on dates, I don't go to parties.. I choose to spend my free time on the computer, doing various things.

It allowed me to say how much time I spend doing X on computers, but it didn't ask me anything about my RL, beyond my satisfaction with it. In my case, this is a drawback, because the numbers are largely skewed towards computer applications, and would show an obvious choice to make the computer time into my social life, rather than have a RL physically interactive social life.

In my opinion, the results of this survey will be heavily skewed, mainly because no questions are asked about how they use their real life, versus their computer life. If all bases were covered on both accounts, the results would be far more accurate. As it stands, I feel the results will be all but worthless in use as a psychological profile of the average user, and would not truly offer any knowledge with any amount of true accuracy.

ETA:: I am no psycho-analysis expert. I've not studied psychology at all, I'm still a high school student for another month and a half or so, and yet I can easily identify the above as a problem. It happens with many 'studies' and surveys, the creator only covers one base well enough to know anything, but the lack of any knowledge into the normal life, that small amount of knowledge becomes useless and inaccurately skewed.

I suggest taking a better look at the survey, OP. Sure, it finds out the reasons for using computers and internet in a possibly large base of people. But to find out anything about their psychology, knowing only that is not enough, I don't believe.

Hey cool, no one ever wants us to fill out surveys around here!

These survey request threads always make me think of the times I visited Washoe, the sign language using chimp and her troop whered they live in Central Washington. These are all chimps that have been in captivity and would be unable to live in the wild. The institution that keeps them does its utmost to provide a good environment so these chimps can have the best possible lives.

One of the rules is this: if a student wishes to conduct any experiements they must be desiged to be enjoyable or interesting for the chimps.

I think the same applies for these surveys. It is not fun to struggle with a survey written with bad grammer. It is not fun to answer multiple choice questions where non of the choices apply to the survee. It is not fun to answer a survey written by someone who knows nothing about the culture of second life. If you want to know about peope who use second life, spend some time in it. Learn to build, get a job as a model, hang out at the welcome areas. You might learn something.

QFT!!